Barbaro Guy Levi, CEO of Aether Bioscience, discusses the personal curiosity behind the company, why consumer needs should come before ingredients, and what scientific integrity means when building a modern consumer bioscience platform.
Your career has taken you through technology, design, distribution, investment and consumer-facing businesses. What connects those experiences, and how have they shaped your work at Aether Bioscience?
I have always been drawn to different fields, as long as they genuinely interested me. As a serial entrepreneur, I have been fortunate to work on things I care deeply about, so work has rarely felt like work. Since my teenage years, sport, personal discipline and an attention to how I live have been constants. Over time, that developed into a fascination with nutrition, human performance and what we now call biohacking.
Then, after a decade investing in food technology, I began to see how those personal interests could connect with everything I had learned professionally. I had been exposed to ambitious founders, new technologies and different approaches to innovation. At a certain point, I felt the pieces were coming together. Aether grew out of that convergence: my curiosity about human wellbeing, my experience as an entrepreneur and the lessons I had learned as an investor.
What did you see in consumer health that convinced you the market needed a different kind of company — rather than another supplement brand?
As an investor, I kept meeting start-ups whose ambition was to disrupt an entire market. There is nothing wrong with that, but it made me think about another kind of opportunity. Sometimes you do not need to change the world to make a meaningful difference. A genuinely useful, honestly developed, human-centred product can make everyday life better.
We saw needs in consumer health that were not being addressed in a sufficiently thoughtful way. Rather than starting with a fashionable ingredient and building a story around it, we wanted to start with the person and the problem. The question for us is whether there is a responsible, scientifically grounded way to make a real difference, and whether we can translate that into something people will actually use. That is the space Aether wants to occupy.
Aether says its starting point is the person, not the ingredient. What changes when that principle is applied to formulation, product design and commercial decisions?
We begin by observing a problem and allowing ourselves to ask a very simple question: ‘What if we approached this differently?’ That is where imagination comes in. We explore possible ways forward, challenge the assumptions and only then move towards scientific assessment, formulation and testing.
It is a balance between curiosity and rigour. We do not begin with an ingredient and look for a reason to sell it. We identify a goal and then examine which tools might help us achieve it. Sometimes that process will confirm an initial idea; sometimes the evidence will take us somewhere else. Either outcome is useful. For us, an ingredient is a means to an end, not the starting point of the business.
Why is sexual wellness a compelling initial area for Aether, and how do you avoid letting the first category define the limits of the whole company?
The way society talks about sexuality has changed dramatically. In many markets, something that used to be surrounded by embarrassment or taboo has become part of a much more open conversation about wellbeing, identity and quality of life. That creates room for products developed with greater sensitivity and seriousness.
Sexual and intimate wellness is a compelling place for us to begin, but it is not intended to define the boundaries of Aether. It connects naturally with areas such as women's hormonal wellbeing, while our broader interests also include micronutrition. What links these fields is our interest in how biology influences everyday experience. We want to apply the same discipline to each opportunity, without assuming that one category, or one solution, can represent the whole company.
You are also building around women’s wellbeing. Why do you distinguish perimenopause from menopause and postmenopause, and what needs are still being overlooked?
I believe this is an enormous area of human wellbeing that still receives far less attention than it deserves. Perimenopause, menopause and postmenopause are not interchangeable labels. They describe different stages, with different experiences, priorities and needs. Treating them as one uniform market would be both superficial and unrealistic.
Women may face many overlapping changes during these stages, and each deserves to be understood on its own terms. Our ambition is not to offer one generic answer to an extremely complex subject. It is to examine specific needs carefully, understand where science can provide a credible response and develop solutions with the individual in mind. That is the kind of attention I believe this field deserves.
A great many wellness claims sound scientific. What evidence do you expect before Aether can responsibly make a promise — and how do you decide when a hypothesis is not ready?
It depends on the question we are trying to answer. When we address a familiar need with well-studied ingredients or approaches, published scientific research gives us a valuable starting point. But that does not mean every finished formulation, or every claim made about it, has automatically been demonstrated.
When we explore a new concept, there is no shortcut: we have to test our assumptions. That means accepting that a promising idea may not deliver the result we expected. Research should help us decide what we can responsibly say, what still needs investigation and what simply is not ready. My instinct as an entrepreneur is to imagine possibilities; the job of science is to put those possibilities to the test. Test, test, test — and be willing to listen to the results.
You want the consumer experience to feel premium, contemporary and desirable rather than clinical. Where is the line between compelling design and the kind of marketing that can undermine scientific trust?
For me, premium does not mean inaccessible or unnecessarily expensive. It means attention to the entire experience. Design matters. The way something looks, feels and fits into someone's life matters. But those things have to support a product with a genuine purpose; they cannot compensate for a weak proposition.
We want Aether to feel contemporary and desirable without behaving like a brand built around the latest trend. More importantly, we want to build a relationship with consumers rather than make a single sale. If someone chooses one Aether product and later encounters another, there should be a clear sense of continuity: the same care in development, the same standards and the same respect for the person using it. Beautiful design and scientific responsibility should reinforce each other.
What must Aether develop once and reuse many times to become a true consumer bioscience platform rather than a portfolio of unrelated supplements?
Our pipeline is not intended to be a collection of whatever products happen to be popular. Everything we develop needs to connect to a clear mission. We are working to address specific aspects of people's everyday wellbeing, with a particularly strong focus on women. That gives us a filter for our decisions: a trend, on its own, is not a reason to launch a product.
A genuine platform should also become stronger with experience. What we learn about consumers, scientific development, formulation and routes to market should inform the next proposition. We do not want to start from zero every time. Women's perspectives are central to how we build Aether, and we want that focus to be visible not just in our language, but in the problems we choose to work on.
Aether is being built with an Irish corporate base and a European development network. How do you choose the first markets and partnerships without confusing early ambition with premature scale?
We considered several possibilities before choosing our initial direction. We looked at the intersection of three factors: the relevance of our category in a particular market, the importance of online purchasing and the openness of consumers to a new proposition. On that basis, the UK emerged as our preferred first market.
Starting in one market is not about thinking small. It is about learning properly. Before expanding, we want to understand how people respond to the proposition, what encourages adoption and where the real friction lies. The same discipline applies to partnerships: we would rather have a smaller number of genuinely useful relationships than chase reach for its own sake. Scale should follow evidence, not precede it.
If we speak again in three years, what would make you say that Aether had built something genuinely valuable — beyond the sales of its first product?
I would be satisfied if we had helped people build meaningful routines that genuinely improved their everyday experience. Sales matter, of course, but they are not the whole measure. I would want to see customers returning because they value what we have created and because it has earned a place in their lives.
That is what I mean by building rituals: not encouraging consumption for its own sake, but making useful habits easier to sustain. If we can develop products that people trust, come back to and recommend because they find them genuinely worthwhile, we will have built something much more valuable than a successful first launch.
What belief about human wellbeing are you most determined to prove through Aether?
I believe we still have a great deal to learn about how to support everyday wellbeing. Serious illness requires proper medical care, but outside that context there are many questions worth asking about nutrition, lifestyle and the natural world. Human beings have been exploring those connections for centuries.
Traditional approaches, including Chinese medicine, are part of that long history of observation and curiosity. I find that history fascinating, although inspiration from tradition is not the same as scientific proof. In a sense, what we now call biohacking may have much older intellectual roots than the name suggests. What matters to me is combining that curiosity with the tools of modern science: asking better questions, testing ideas properly and turning what we can substantiate into responsible, useful products.